by Ann Harries
Contents
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Epilogue
Afterword
Author’s Note
A Note on the Author
By the Same Author
One
Cape Town, 17 March 1899
One morning Patrick Donnelly strolled down the steep streets of the District, enjoying the appreciative glances of women and kicking idly at the occasional rat. Behind him the mountain reared up like a great stony wave about to break, with all the houses of the District clinging to its lower slopes like specks of foam; beyond lay the harbour, fluttering with the sails of tall ships. And further out, in the blue eye of the bay, the leper island bulged. Already the smell of blood rose from the slaughterhouse below.
There was something fluid in the young man’s movements that distinguished him from other pedestrians: a swing in the shoulders, a suppleness in the hips, a buoyancy of footwork: he could have been sauntering in time to a tune in his head. He was jauntily dressed in blazer and boater, though a glance at his trousers and boots revealed them as well worn, even shabby. His boater was tilted at an angle so that his dark, well-oiled hair was at least partially visible. A green ribbon fluttered on the breast pocket of his blazer, which itself was striped in a variety of shades of that verdant hue. Yet nowhere was this colour more intensely concentrated than in the young man’s eyes which flickered emerald every time a pretty girl swayed past.
Although Patrick Donnelly had an appointment to keep in the city’s great harbour, it was not his style to hurry, and he paused on the busy Parade to practise his new grin in a stall of window-glass and mirrors. He arranged the left side of his mouth into a careless half-smile, and narrowed the eye above it suggestively. A dozen smirks blossomed back at him: he was satisfied.
‘And a happy St Patrick’s day to ye, young Patch!’ cried Mr O’Brien, the coal heaver, on his way back from a night shift at the docks, and similarly adorned with bright green ribbon. ‘And may the snakes never get ye!’
‘Oh, don’t you worry, it’s the snakes who’s afraid of me!’ retorted Patch, undoing his smile quickly. He had indeed chased a cobra out of his landlady Mrs Witbooi’s kitchen on the slopes of the Mountain – or rather, the snake had slowly coiled and uncoiled its way out, hooded head erect and forked tongue fluttering so fast it seemed to belong to some other creature in the cobra’s body. Never mind that it had taken a couple of hours for his pounding heart to beat normally and his hands to stop shaking; no one had seen that.
It was Mrs Witbooi who had put him on to the morning’s mission. Two days ago she’d said, ‘There’s a job waiting for you at the harbour. All you have to do is turn up at the Gateway for the interview, nine o’clock Thursday morning. Ask for Dr Simmonds.’ It so happened that Patch was at that moment suddenly unemployed and in urgent need of cash, so this was good news – until she added, looking up from the chillies and ginger she was chopping, ‘You like lepers, don’t you?’ and refused to be drawn any further.
Now a young woman called to him from behind terraced buckets of cut flowers: lilies, roses, dahlias, marigolds, all turned their faces to him with an accusing air. His heart sank, for when Mrs Witbooi’s daughter Fancy was angry she was dangerous as any snake. Her dark face blazed with passion. ‘I waited till ten o’clock last night!’ she yelled from a thicket of hostile sunflowers. ‘Where were you?’ Her gaze swung wildly round her stall as if looking for something to throw at him, a stone jug, perhaps, or a bucket full of thorned roses.
Patch ducked in advance. Fancy had a surprisingly accurate aim. She had once knocked him out with a hurtling chamber pot in mid-argument. Dammit, he’d meant to avoid the flower market. ‘Well, top of the mornin’ to ye, Fancy!’ It came naturally to him, when charm was needed, to adopt the Irish brogue he’d learnt from the nuns. ‘Sure, did anyone ever tell you that you’re the most beautiful girl in the District? In Cape Town? In the Colony?’ As his knowledge of geography did not extend much beyond these boundaries he added, with dramatic emphasis: ‘In the whole wide world!’
This eulogy did not appear to achieve the desired effect. ‘Don’t try that fake accent out on me!’ Fancy shook her head scornfully, but her gaze softened as it settled on his self-deprecating half-smile. ‘It’s actions, not words I want.’
The unconscious thrust of her body roused him but he was not going to be distracted from his plans. ‘Sure, I must be off now,’ he cried, raising his boater in mock-politeness. ‘I’ll celebrate St Patrick with ye tonight instead, ye’ll see if I won’t!’
He skipped along the broad avenue lined with palm trees that led to the docks. Fancy’s image tumbled through his head in all its brilliant colours: her black hair gleaming with blue lights; her teeth whiter than the sprig of jasmine behind her ear; her brilliant red skirts; her blue blouse checked with lemon yellow; and beneath it her warm brown breasts. But Fancy must never find out his intentions, not till he was safely out of the way. He wasn’t ready for wedding bells, not yet, but she was persistent. He slowed down to his former lazy saunter.
He was passing the orphanage convent of Our Lady of Mercy where he had spent his entire childhood and early adolescence, till three years ago. Perhaps he should slip into the little church to ask his plaster parents on either side of the altar for advice on his future. His mother, azure-eyed Mary, brushed back the folds of her powder-blue cloak to reveal the seven swords of sorrow stabbing right into her heart, with blood spilling all the way down her long white frock, while his father, poor old St Joseph, held Baby Jesus out of danger, away from all those dripping blades. In spite of her wounded heart (and each sword represented a terrible sin of mankind) she gazed sweetly at Patch every time he came to visit her. There was sadness in that gaze, for Patch was a wayward son. The reason why he was unemployed was that he’d just lost his job as salesman in Mr Feinstein’s shoe stall on the pavement of Dover Street, high up in the District. Who’d have thought the old man would have noticed he’d borrowed three pairs of patent leathers for the night, when competing in the Tivoli Talent Contest with the Trusty Trio. The Trio was made up of Fancy’s brother Johan; the limey Cartwright, recently arrived from England and hoping to make his fortune on the gold-fields in Jo’burg but unable to wrench himself from the District; and of course himself. Johan, famous for his hairdressing innovations, had plastered their coifs into the three mountains of Cape Town: Patch had Devil’s Peak with its open-mouthed profile; Cartwright had Lion’s Head over one ear and Signal Hill over the other, which made him look as if a dog was sleeping on his head; Johan had the great flat-topped Table Mountain perched above his forehead, so that he somewhat resembled Frankenstein’s square-headed monster.
One of the nuns stared at him coolly as he entered the church, resisting his hopeful smile. Strange how they still held his childhood behaviour against him when he’d left the orphanage so long ago. Why had they never allowed him to be an altar boy and swing the incense up and down the aisle all over the congregation, and ring the four-tongued bell at the consecration of the host into Jesus’ flesh-and-blood body? He still felt an ache of disappointment about this, but now he could see Mary with her outstretched hands, already welcoming him into the dim interior of the church.
Q 56 Is the Blessed Virgin our Mother also?
A 56 The Blessed Virgin is our mother also because, being the
brethren of Jesus, we are the Children of Mary.
It was just as well Mary had taken on these maternal responsibilities in spite of being a virgin, as his own flesh and blood mother had dumped him with the Sisters of Mercy eighteen years ago when he was a few days old, with a mother-of-pearl rosary wrapped ro
und his hand to show he was Roman Catholic. ‘Sure, you came without the invitation,’ said scornful Sister Madeleine, as if he should have got permission to be born. ‘You could have been put in a shoe box and thrown into the sea, like many an unwanted baby.’ He still had bad dreams about this: the cardboard box came bobbing towards him on the slithery oceans of the night, inside it a lifeless boy-child curled up, his tiny hand fisted against his chin.
The nuns believed in getting permission. If you asked, please, sister, may I wet the bed? they’d have said, yes, my child, but if you just went ahead and wet it without asking, they whipped out the bamboo stick, specially cut from the thicket by Jonas the gardener, and beat your bottom, leaving thin red stripes criss-crossed all over it, and a trace of blood. If Sister Madeleine was really angry with you she’d make you sit in a tub of water and then beat your wet bottom, till it felt it might burst into flames. It was as if the nuns wanted to thrash his spirit into a shape of their own, and turn him into someone quite different from Patch Donnelly. Well, they hadn’t succeeded, had they, but he didn’t hold it against them, though he’d have liked a little kindness sometimes.
The air in the church was still heavy with incense from the early morning Mass, the altar rails festooned in green satin ribbons to celebrate the saint’s day. He felt a surge of pleasure, as if this display were there to celebrate his own name. He dipped his fingers into the bowl of holy water in the porch but just as he was halfway through the sign of the cross, a bugle call and a drum roll sent a thrill through his body. ‘Sorry, mother,’ he whispered to the patient statue, and sped out into the brightness of the day to watch the Tommies march past. The regiment was newly disembarked to judge from their grey skins but they marched with a brisk precision, a boyish bugler leading the way. He felt a twinge of envy. How much smarter he would have looked at the head of this pith-helmeted, khakiclad parade – why, that little bugler could be no more than fourteen years old, a mere child, look at his smooth, smug face!
He at last reached the harbour. Cape Town was now the busiest seaport in the world, it was said, something to do with the gold and diamond fields up north and all the merchants and mining men hurrying there to get rich – not to mention all the Tommies arriving, now that war over the gold seemed likely. In fact, merely to walk into the dockland was to find yourself in another country, for the whole place was seething with foreign sailors who shouted to each other in strange languages – and within the arms of the harbour a whole city of tall ships rocked and shuddered with the sweep of the tides and the flurry of the wind, a city of masts and riggings and ropes and ladders that rose from the decks of a hundred different sailing vessels: three-masted frigates, four-masted barques, square-rigged schooners, tea-clippers, yachts – all with their sails furled and their flags a-flutter and their hulls creaking impatiently. A Dutch sailor who spoke perfect English had told the incredulous Patch that every single rope had its own name and that each rope was attached to a different sail, each sail also having its own name. Not being of a maritime disposition, the only sail Patch could remember the name of was the mizzen topgallant which the Dutchman called grietje, being the last sail visible to poor sad Mar-grietje standing on the dijks of Holland and waving to her sweetheart as he sailed off over the horizon. The steamers, lacking the glory of sails, had a different appeal as their funnels slid over the far edge of the bay, one by one, leaving a ghostly trail of smoke after the boats themselves had disappeared.
Now he pushed his way among the already drunk seafaring men until he arrived at last at the door of the Gateway to Africa tavern. Gusts of tobacco smoke and raucous laughter burst out of the gloomy inn, entwined with the thin wail of a sailor’s hornpipe. In a sudden fit of nervousness Patch fingered the miraculous medallion which hung round his neck. ‘Oh Mary, Mother of us, send me a sign. Tell me if I can work among the lepers. For I am afraid.’ He could feel the small raised image of Mary, long beams of light radiating from her hands. The beams heated up beneath his touch till they nearly burnt his fingertips. Already he felt bolder.
But once he was inside, so thick was the smoke and so crowded was the interior with Jack Tars from all over the world regaining their land-legs with rum and brandy, that he could not see anyone who might be his new employer. He pushed his way to the bar counter. ‘Know someone Sinning here?’ he asked Isabella whom he knew well. ‘I’d say just about everyone here’s sinning, me dear,’ she grinned, pouring a large tot of Cape Smoke into a glass. ‘But if it’s Doctor Simmonds you want, he’s under the stairs.’
In the depths of the tavern, beside a rickety flight of steps, a solitary man sat at a table. A sign bearing the legend INTERVIEWS leaned against a pewter mug. So gloomy was the position the interviewer had chosen that Patch could not decipher his features until he hovered at the table’s edge, uncertain how to proceed. The man, whose lower face was shrouded in an unfashionably cut black beard, glanced up at him with sharp eyes. ‘You Patrick Donnelly?’
‘I am, sir,’ said Patch in a voice drenched in humility. He removed his boater and smoothed his hair.
The interviewer stared hard at him for a few moments, as if gauging his very essence. For several minutes, it seemed, he continued with his fierce exploration of the young man’s face, until Patch was obliged to rearrange his features into a more ingratiating composition. ‘Sit down,’ said the interviewer, finally; then leaned over and narrowed his eyes. ‘Do you have a hard heart, boy?’ he asked, in sepulchral tones.
Patch looked down at the left side of his chest. He thought of Fancy, from whom he was fleeing; of Sister Madeleine’s beatings; of his own abandonment; and a shadow passed over his tender young features. ‘Yes, sir,’ he declared. ‘Hard as nails.’ He curled his long limbs into the small chair and tapped the mug hopefully. ‘Or as hard as this tankard.’
The doctor raised his thick eyebrows in mock amazement. His teeth shone in his beard. ‘The name’s Jack Simmonds. I’m the doctor at the leper hospital on the Island.’ He looked deep into the green gaze of the young man. ‘You’re not afraid to separate husbands from wives or parents from children, should they try to come together? By force, if necessary? According to the Leprosy Repression Act.’
Patch swallowed, though his mouth was dry. ‘N-no, sir.’ He had not thought of this. Oh Mary, Mother of God, come to my assistance. He had thought only of getting away from the District to that cowpat of an island dropped into the dead centre of the glittering bay, an island inhabited by convicts, lepers and loonies, the outcasts of society, where he could feel at home and earn a bit of money.
‘You’re not afraid of catching leprosy?’
‘A leper lived among us in the District,’ murmured Patch. ‘Not one of us caught the disease.’
‘You are right,’ said the doctor. ‘Yet leprosy is spreading. Amongst both white and coloured classes. We have wealthy Dutch farmers on the Island as afflicted as the most wretched Hottentot or Kaffir. And a considerable number are closely concealed on the mainland, carefully hidden by their friends and family.’ He paused for a moment, frowning. ‘We still know little about the causes of leprosy. Some believe it is contagious or at least communicable by means of a cut or sore; others that it is inherited; yet others that the bacterium is present in saliva and snot. Also in more intimate bodily discharges.’ He looked meaningfully at the young man. ‘The guard’s job is to keep husbands and wives apart. And to make sure they don’t try to escape to the mainland in their flimsy home-made boats.’
‘Is there no cure?’ Patch slid his eyes towards the empty tankard.
‘In certain ways the disease may be temporarily arrested. But as a rule it goes steadily from bad to worse, until death removes the patient from a life that is almost worse than death.’ The doctor’s voice was dreary; then, noting how the colour had drained from the young man’s eyes, he added: ‘But on a more positive note, the system sometimes throws off the disease – it cures itself. I call such cases “self-cured”. I know of several such cases. The extremitie
s may be lost, but the ulceration heals. The disease never returns, even though perforating ulcers may re-occur on the body due to the continued presence of the diseased bones. In my view such ulcers are not the symptom of leprosy but the result.’ He could see Patch growing restless. ‘You can start on Monday. Seven pounds a month. Every third weekend off.’ As Patch did not reply he added, ‘It’s not all doom and gloom, you know. We even have a sea-water swimming pool. And some of the women have done wonders with their gardens.’ He looked to see if this meant anything to Patch; paused a minute; then said, ‘Come across to the Island with me now on the Tiger and you can see for yourself. Don’t take any notice of the lunatics and convicts on board. They won’t be your responsibility.’
There was something weird about the Island, as if it was inhabited by a desolate spirit which welled invisibly out of the sea and infected the sharp heat. Black crocodile’s-teeth rocks fringed its ragged shores waiting to bite into passing boats. Dr Simmonds wasn’t affected by it. He showed Patch round the lazaretto with some pride. ‘Six pavilions for the men, five for the women. Whites, kaffirs, coloured folk all in separate pavilions. And here’s the sea-water swimming pool.’ A few malformed kaffirs splashed about in the pool with a nun looking on. ‘And a church.’ They walked along a gravel road which led away from the sea. He pointed to a neat whitewashed building surmounted by a cross. ‘Designed by the same young architect who built Cecil Rhodes’ house. Herbert Baker. Rhodes recently donated a bath chair for white female lepers.’ The doctor shot a look at Patch’s blank face. ‘Let’s go inside.’ It was a sin for Catholics to enter non-Catholic churches but Patch didn’t want to seem lily-livered. No stained-glass windows or statues with bleeding hearts in Herbert Baker’s church. No smell of incense. No tabernacle with a red light burning to show Jesus was in there. Also no pews. ‘Where do they sit?’ whispered Patch. He touched the medal under his shirt.